Joss On Goners Via The A.V. Club
The Onion’s A.V. Club has a long interview with Joss which covers a lot of ground about its status.
AVC: With that in mind, what can you say about Goners, the horror-fantasy film you’re developing?
JW: Well, there may be some female empowerment in it at some point. [Laughs.] I don’t know who put that there. It’s the same brew that I tend to brew, which is a combination of horror, and heroes, and people crying, and female empowerment. It’s been the thing that’s made my career, but it’s also the thing that’s come the closest to killing it: Whenever I write anything, I want to stuff every genre in that I possibly can. And then people are like, “Well, we don’t know how to market that, and if we don’t know how to market it…” [Whispers.] “We’re not going to make it.” [Laughs.] Although Universal’s been great, and they understand exactly what I want, what the movie’s about. In 18 months of working on Wonder Woman, nobody asked me what the movie was about, whereas at Universal, I’ve never had that problem. They really get it. Obviously, Goners is about human connection, and loneliness, and responsibility, and power, and the things that I inevitably end up writing about, because they’re the only things that interest me. Besides sex, and there’s not a lot of sex in it. I’ll probably have to change that in my next rewrite.
AVC: What’s its current status?
JW: I’m rewriting it. Rather more often than I’d hoped. [Laughs.] It’s pretty much where it was, which is bought by Universal, but not greenlit.
AVC: Do you intend it as a stand-alone project, or a new franchise?
JW: Yes. Yes, it has the potential to be the f-word, franchise. That can sometimes kill you, because when people start seeing that, sometimes they stop seeing the movie. It killed me with Serenity, because everybody was left with a bad taste in their mouth. We kind of failed. The movie did not make scads, at the box office, it barely broke even. But it made oodles of money on DVD, it’s doing just fine. But everyone was like, “Wow, we didn’t get to make the trilogy.” There was never a trilogy! In this sense, this movie is very much a journey. It’s not just a classic superhero movie—set up a premise, and here are some cool people, here are the rules, and let’s go. It’s very much this woman’s journey, and it’s a very painful, strange, hellish journey. I have to concentrate on that, not the fact that there may be dolls. But, unfortunately, once the word “franchise” comes up, people look at the structure of the script you’ve given them differently. That’s just going to happen. The word “franchise” has almost killed my career. If people don’t stop using it, I’m going to get very twitchy.
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AVC: Getting back to Goners… You’ve been very secretive about the plot, just as you’ve always been close-mouthed about your projects in advance. Which makes a lot of sense when people are trying to get you to admit how you’re going to resolve some big cliffhanger on one of your shows, but it seems a little odder when you’re talking about an unknown project.
JW: The fact of the matter is, I’m not trying to sell it. In fact, I’m trying to keep it from being sold, because if everybody gets sold on it, and it doesn’t happen for two and a half years, they’ll feel like they already bought it. The people to whom I must sell it have bought it. [Laughs.] That’s good. They got to read the whole script. There’s no way everybody who wants to can find everything they want to know about the movie before it comes out. That is one of the worst things in our culture. I believe it’s destroying storytelling. Now, I can’t stop it, but I’m certainly not going to lay out the entire story when I haven’t even got a green light on production, because then, people already feel like they’ve lived with a character, and not in a good way. It’s not intelligent marketing, and it’s not intelligent storytelling. I understand there’s a limit. There’s a point at which you have to talk about it. I struggled with this while doing the promos for Buffy, when people were like, “This act-two twist is what makes people come see the show. You absolutely have to put it in the preview.” The entire world has turned into the opening credits from Battlestar Galactica and that just can’t be. My wife and I always shut our eyes during those.
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AVC: You said in a very recent interview that you’re going to find out in the next few weeks whether you’re going to be able to do Goners this year. If that doesn’t work out, is it likely to be scheduled for next year?
JW: Well, if it doesn’t go through this year, a) that’ll suck. [Laughs.] And b) something else will. That’s part of the idea of putting together small projects. I gotta roll. I gotta roll. I gotta feed the beast, as they say. I love to shoot. And I love the comics, and I’m having the time of my life, and when this comes out, there will have been a new comic unveiled, and it’s great, but that’s not enough for me, and it’s not enough for the fans, either. I need to film some people. [Laughs.] So if it’s not Goners, it’ll be something.
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